someone asked me how i made the hitler video with subtitles, so if anyone else is ambitious and wants to try it, here are some guidelines to get you started:

there's an easy way and a hard way to make subtitles.

the way to create the subtitles is with a free shareware program called "subtitle workshop." you start with a video file in some normal format like avi or mpg.

subtitle workshop displays the movie with the time showing, and there is a worksheet at the bottom. as you watch the video, you type in the time you want the subtitle to start displaying and the time you want it to stop, in minutes and seconds. the default is 2 seconds. then you type in the text you want to see displayed at the bottom. you need to do that for each line of text. in "hitler" i had to type 100 lines of text for a 4-minute video.

when you are finished with all of the text, and you're satisfied with the timing, you save the file in "srt" format. this is a standard format for "soft" subs.

"soft" subs are the easy way. this was the first time i had ever tried to make subtitles, so it took me twice as long as it should have, and didn't look as good as it should have. if i ever do this again, i will know better.

if you just want to give the video to someone, you make the name of your "srt" file the same thing as the original video file. so if the original file was hitler.avi, you name the subtitle file hitler.srt, and put them in the same folder. as long as they are in the same folder, and have the same name, windows media player will play the movie with the subtitles, without actually changing the movie file. that's why they are called "soft" subs; they aren't fixed, and the movie can still be played without them.

if you want to post a file with soft subs on youtube, things could get a little tricky. youtube is supposed to allow you to add subtitles to videos that you have uploaded. "srt" is one of the two formats they accept, so you just follow their instructions for uploading the subtitles. i never got that far because i had a problem with the "srt" file. for some reason, the first two subtitles and four later lines would not display, no matter what i did.

so i opened windows movie maker (which you should also have on your pc) and typed in all one hundred lines again. these are "hard" subs. movie maker allows you to add titles just about anywhere on the screen, so you have to move them around to get them in the right place. i couldn't get them in the very bottom, where "hitler" has a nice empty black box that would set them off really well.

if i had more time, maybe i could have solved the technical problems with the soft subs, and the production values would have been better, but i wanted to get it online before the kinross over was finished. if you have to use hard subs, the text will be permanently written into the movie, which you may or may not want.

once you get used to doing this, it isn't really that hard. i was able to muddle through it without really knowing what i was doing. the most work is writing the script and getting the timing right. the technical stuff is pretty easy, and once you get used to "subtitle workshop" inserting lines becomes fairly intuitive. movie maker is a lot harder to work with, so if you can get by with soft subs, that's the way to go.